Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Seduction Novel’S Awakening, Julia Francis

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Fracturing The Mirror: Girls Made Of Snow And Glass, Abigael Good

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

From The Womb To The Word: Pregnancy And Pregnancy Metaphors In 16th And 17th Century English Literature, Kelly S. Westeen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation employs a feminist theoretical lens in exploring the gendered uses of pregnancy and pregnancy metaphors in the production and dissemination of literary works in early modern England. By also examining the history of the printing press and the role it played in gendered textual production, early modern constructs of family and the role of mothers, as well as obstetric medicine and childbirth, I aim to demonstrate that mothering and authorship were congruent activities for female writers. Conversely, I argue that male writers of the period who employed metaphors of gestation did so not to try to claim biological …

Sex, Lies, And Murder: Feminized Detective Fiction And The English Estate Novel, Meaghan Lanctot

The Criterion

In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the protagonists unravel the events of egregious crimes and their own complicity with the central tragedies. Set against the backdrop of crumbling English estates, the crimes highlight the erosion of the British ruling class at the onset of the 20th century. The unnamed narrator of Rebecca and Briony, the narrator of Atonement, are bound by their youth, age, and gender in their respective investigations into the sinister events that plague the history of Manderley and the Tallis estate, respectively. We see how the English estate is a hotbed of illicit …

Interiority And Narrative Temporality In Jane Austen’S Persuasion, Margaret Flahery

The Criterion

Jane Austen’s last completed work, Persuasion, explores protagonist Anne Elliot’s female agency through use of free indirect discourse and time shifts. In the novel, published in 1817, Austen mediates between different time periods — the present day and seven years prior — to demonstrate Anne’s maturity and the evolved perspective of a woman’s status in society. Anne’s shifting interiority reflects what it means to be a woman in the Regency era, and, perhaps, across time, as she breaks out of the mediated and subjective perceptions placed upon her by herself and other characters. The result is a revolutionary conception of …

Examining Fatherhood Through Historical Empathy In Tristram Shandy, Marygrace King

The Criterion

Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy follows the tangential musings of Tristram Shandy — musings so roundabout and convoluted that they force modern readers either to eyerolls of frustration or to a reconceived sense of humor. Within this essay, I explore the character of Tristram’s father, Walter Shandy, through a lens of historical empathy. To twenty-first century standards, Walter’s fatherhood is lacking and distant, even uncaring; yet when viewed through the lens of an eighteenth-century perspective, Walter’s motivations and eccentricities begin to make sense in the context of eighteenth-century mortality rates. I explore his unorthodox …

British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“British Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Natural Education” offers a distinct perspective on Romantic-era ideas on “natural” education and human development. Though the Romantic retreat into nature has long been understood as a break from the Enlightenment’s programmatic commitment to the progress of reason, I contend that the ideas on natural development of four canonical Romantic authors—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley—actually originate in the ideas of one of the foremost figures of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural education is doomed to failure in Rousseau’s thought because “nature” is paradoxically a social construct. I argue that …

Matrons, Mothers, And Monsters: The Heroine In Beowulf, Grendel, And The Mere Wife, Grace Lucier

College Honors Program

This thesis examines the relationship between gender and heroism in the Beowulf tale and two of its modern retellings. It includes an exploration of the medieval gender roles of the original epic using Seamus Heaney and E. Talbot Donaldson’s translations. This thesis also addresses the ways in which some characters disturb gender binaries and social roles — especially in the case of Grendel’s mother. The second and third chapters focus on two retellings of the Beowulf text respectively: John Gardner’s Grendel , told from the perspective of the monster Grendel; and Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife , which is …

Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund

Theses and Dissertations

My MA thesis examines sixteenth and seventeeth-century lyric poetry by the male poets Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell. These poets make use of different lyric genres and forms, including Petrarchan sonnets and carpe diem arguments, to torture the purported female mistresses. A close examination of specific works, including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Donne’s “The Apparition”, Carew’s “Song: Persuasion to Enjoy”, and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” demonstrates that they all share a preoccupation with weaponizing poetry in their depiction of mistresses and female lovers in pain and punishment. Poetry functions as a tool for imposing …

Hawthorne’S Faith, Cecelia Little

English Student Scholarship

Major: English and Philosophy

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Margaret Reid, English

This project is an examination of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, particularly focused on Hawthorne’s identity, philosophy, and spirituality. Placing these ideas in the context of early American history as well as in the context of Hawthorne’s biography, Cecelia Little focuses on how Hawthorne offers pieces of a new and complex philosophy of the individual human soul within the human community. This powerpoint includes a structured compilation of many, but by no means all, of her findings, and she plans to delve much further into Hawthorne’s life and works. The primary focus …

Blake’S Method: Blake Imagining Milton In The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell, Micaela Freeman

English Student Scholarship

Major: English

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Bruce Graver, English

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is William Blake’s articulation of his reaction to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. After analyzing Blake’s reaction to Paradise Lost, I will suggest how Blake’s reading of Milton helped shape 20th-century criticism, specifically post-war Miltonic criticism. My paper will begin by considering Blake’s rewriting of Milton in the ‘Argument’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, starting at the Adamic myth. I will continue my analysis with looking at the famous passage on Plate 6 when Blake writes, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote …

The White Album As Neo-Victorian Fiction Of Loss, Lucas Kwong

Publications and Research

Although much has been written about the Beatles' celebration of Victorian culture on the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, little scholarship, if any, has focused on the White Album’s relationship to the late Victorian period. This paper examines the White Album through the lens of what Victorian studies scholar Stephen Arata has called “fictions of loss,” a body of late Victorian texts depicting intertwined processes of “national, biological, [and] aesthetic” decline. Through examining songs like "Helter Skelter" and "Revolution Number 9," I argue that the White Album deserves consideration alongside Dracula and She as a “fiction of loss,” …

Failures Of Grace: Limits Of Tragedy In The Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anick S. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Failures of Grace argues that nineteenth-century novelists challenge the hegemonies of literary form and the value of personal suffering through what I call the trans-genre tragic novel. This new form is emblematic of a period in which values hang in the balance and places traditional values at odds with themselves by combining the low form of the novel with the highest mimetic mode in the Western tradition: tragedy. It simultaneously proposes the most vulnerable members of society as tragic heroes in contrast to the noble figures who previously were presumed to define the genre.

Through close readings of works by …

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Leading The Soul: Use Of Rhetoric In Horace’S Odes, Kelly Freestone

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Ship Of Fools: Hieronymus Bosch In Response To Sebastian Brant, Ella Parker

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

“If I Cannot Inspire Love, I Will Cause Fear”: Reading The Creature’S Development Through Godwin’S Educational Theory In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Mikaela Huang

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Roald Dahl And The Construction Of Childhood: Writing The Child As Other, Madeline Spivey

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Portraiture And The Convergence Of Social Classes In Bleak House, Heather Twele

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Losing The West: A Critical Analysis Of Crane’S “The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky", Kaylee Weatherspoon

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 22, 2020, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

‘Weill Auchtyn Eldris Exemplis Ws To Steir’: Aeneas And The Narrator In The Prologues To Gavin Douglas’S Eneados, P. J. Klemp

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the translation of Virgil's Aeneid into Middle Scots by Gavin Douglas (1474-1522), the first translation of a major classical work into either Scots or English, analyzing the role of the narrator/translator in the prologues Douglas wrote, and arguing that by blurring the boundary between his own prefatory material and the Virgil text he was translating, Douglas brought the two elements into relationship to form a unified epic masterpiece.

Shelley’S Frankenstein As A Book Of Love And Despair, Shun-Liang Chao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Influenced by Enlightenment philosophes like Rousseau and Smith, Romantic writers, such as Coleridge and Percy Shelley, celebrate the sublime power of sympathetic love to merge the self and the other (be it human or inhuman) into a wondrous whole, thereby precluding the dangers of solitude and solipsism. Not all Romantic writers, however, share the same sanguine view of love. In Frankenstein, for instance, Mary Shelley offers an alternative to the optimistic perspective on the capacity of (mutual) sympathy. She shapes the novel into tales of bitter solitude, one caused by the lack of sympathetic understanding between Victor and nature, …

Reading The Readers : Analyses Of Shakespearean And Cervantine Characters As (Dys)Functional Readers., Erin Shannon O'Reilly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how the protagonists of Don Quixote and The Tempest perform the act of reading. It explores how the authors create interpretive communities within their works and bring them into conflict in order to foreground the dysfunctionality of particular types of reading. While functional readers are capable of reading among and beyond diverse interpretive communities, dysfunctional readers operate within a single community to the exclusion of other possible interpretations. Chapter One examines Cervantes’s creation of multiple interpretive communities within the first six chapters of Don Quixote, and how Don Quixote acts as dysfunctional reader through his inability …

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Illegitimacy And The Power Of The Mother In The Lais Of Marie De France, Claudia Mccarron

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Reflecting Identity Through Glass Windows In Charles Dickens’S Tom Tiddler’S Ground, Ryder Seamons

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.